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50B birds live on Earth, new study finds
- Breadmaker 5y agohttps://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118
- p1mrx 5y agoWhere do the rest live?
- joecool1029 5y agoPresumably above the Earth or in the case of burrowing birds, in the Earth.
- glup 5y agoExoornithologists disagree.
- mrweasel 5y agoThat seems really low. There has to be massive areas of the world with no birds at all. I mean there is, like the sea, but then there are 20 sparrows in my garden.
- acomjean 5y agoIts only 8 birds per human. I would have thought there were more as well.
- lapetitejort 5y agoThere are 3 trillion trees in the world. 60 trees for every bird. I guess I can look around and see empty trees, but then rarely I see a tree with tens, perhaps hundreds of birds in them.
- m463 5y agoespecially in comparison to cats-killing-bird numbers "domestic cats, considered a global invasive species, kill 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds in the lower 48 states each year" https://www.audubon.org/news/cats-pose-even-bigger-threat-birds-previously-thought https://www.audubon.org/news/cats-pose-even-bigger-threat-bi... https://www.audubon.org/news/how-stop-cats-killing-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/how-stop-cats-killing-birds
- oneeyedpigeon 5y agoI guess your neighbour's thinking the same thing about the same 20 sparrows.
- daniel-levin 5y agoPresumably not including chickens... broilers only live for 33 days on average
- peanut_worm 5y agoI thought the Red-billed quelea was the most abundant bird? There are about 1.5 billion apparently and they form flocks of 2 million+
- optimalsolver 5y agoImagine the suffering that exists in nature at any given moment. Billions and trillions of creatures in various states of pain, fear, and want. Then multiply all those experiences for every time frame back to the first organisms. I don't think people think about the implications of a billion years of natural selection.
- p1mrx 5y agoMaybe nature wouldn't be so metal if genes could feel pain.
- bugzz 5y agoYeah, I think about this. So many small animals die in slow, painful ways (naturally - i.e. centipedes eating mice, preying mantises eating birds). Makes me wonder if eventually in the future there would be some moral prerogative to somehow tame the natural world
- redisman 5y agoYes let’s fuck up nature even more, what could ever go wrong
- nverno 5y agoLife is just an ongoing chemical reaction. Maybe in the future people will start empathizing with metal and feel a moral prerogative to stop its oxidation. Larry David may be onto something when he asks 'Do you even respect wood!?'
- bugzz 5y agoI feel like you have to believe at least one of these 3: 1) Life is just a chemical reaction, human sadness / happiness don't matter 2) Humans are fundamentally different than other animals - our pain is somehow more real than animal pain 3) Animal pain does matter. Personally I favor 3)
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- AnonC 5y agoThis study does not seem to consider or count farmed birds, such as chickens (and others). Yet it mentions impact on ecology, as if farmed animals don’t count. Just the farmed birds on earth would add up to 25 billion or more.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoI am not sure what to think of this. Just a quick back of the napkin basic math implies that there are about 18,000-22,000 square feet for every single bird.
- lsiunsuex 5y agoThis contributes to a thought I had years ago. We used to smoke in the parking lot; a co-worker would feed the birds that came daily - contrary to fight club, feeding birds around a parking lot of cars does not cause the birds to poop on the cars lol Anyway - I always wondered - how many birds are in the world? Then walk down the street, around town, where ever - how many dead birds do you see on the side of the road? 1 every once in a great while maybe? Where do birds go to die? Or are they just eaten right away by their prey? Stray cats? Hawks?
- hzay 5y agoWe started feeding pigeons at our 8th floor apartment in india. Above us is just sky where lots of Kites circle. Over time, the pigeons decided our house is their... hospital? They'd show up here when sick. We'd leave food and water out for them, but they were often too sick to eat or drink. Sometimes they'd recover and fly away, but other times they just sit and wait for death (usually 2-3 days). Some corners of the terrace provide shelter from cats that hunt in the apartments so that could be why they choose this place. Anyway in the last year, I have seen 4 pigeons die here (one eaten by cat). I think birds of prey or cats get to a lot of dying birds first, so we don't often see them. Even when the birds do die a non-violent death, they seem to be able to choose their spot for dying.
- oblak 5y ago> Where do birds go to die? Or are they just eaten right away by their prey? Stray cats? Hawks? I can distinctly remember seeing a pigeon nose dive mid flight at ~25m height right in front of me. It... just fell. Still one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. To top it all, a stray cat caught it in literally less than a second after hitting the ground. Not sure if that was nature or someone shot the poor thing with an air gun or something.
- lapetitejort 5y agoI've seen dead animals dissolve into nothing over the course of a few days. So many things feast on even the smallest of corpses. Nature recycles itself quickly.
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- tldrthelaw 5y agoWhich makes the fact that the passenger pigeon once number 3-5 billion individuals in North America all the more staggering. Assuming the 50b number has not gone down significantly, it may have been that 1 out of every 10 birds on the planet was a passenger pigeon. They say the flocks would black out the sky passing over.
- havelhovel 5y agoI have read similar accounts of the passenger pigeon and trust them to be mostly truthful, at least relative to what we can hope to see in the present day. However, as you suggest, the 50b number represents bird populations under crisis and does not represent their pre-Industrial levels, or even last Century’s.
- dTal 5y agoI was also thinking of passenger pigeons, but I suspect that - rather than any special prevalence of passenger pigeons specifically - the actual conclusion to draw from that is that 50B globally is a tiny number compared to what biomes there were previously.
- ShiftPrintBlog 5y agoWired had an article last week on "interspecies money" to identify and attach monetary value to everything on the planet - including birds and trees - to give agency to these actors. Sounds like this mission will be more difficult :) Thanks for sharing the article though
- erellsworth 5y agoWell, birds aren't real so...
- fctorial 5y ago26 billion of those are chickens?
- grumple 5y agoTwo points, from the study itself, 50B is their median estimate but their mean estimate is 428 billion [1]: > We calculate that there are likely to be ∼50 billion individual birds in the world at present: about six birds for every human on the planet. This represents the midpoint of our estimates (i.e., the median), albeit with considerable uncertainty (Fig. 2). Compared with the median estimate, the mean estimate of the aggregated distribution for all birds in the world was ∼428 billion individual birds (Fig. 2). While we provide an estimate with a wide highest-density interval, our estimate corresponds well with a previous estimate of the number of individual birds in the world by Gaston and Blackburn (37), who estimated that there were between 200 and 400 billion individual birds in the world. Notably, Gaston and Blackburn (37) did not estimate species separately but rather extrapolated from small-scale density estimates in which all bird species were considered equal. We, however, provide data for nearly all the world’s bird species. This is a massive disparity in their own estimates, and they acknowledge the uncertainty. As others have noted, they are also not including farmed birds, so this is an estimate of birds in nature. 1. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118
- rblion 5y agoThat number was much higher a few hundred years ago I bet. We've wiped out a lot of the biosphere by converting wilderness into cities and farms.
- havelhovel 5y agoNorth America’s wild bird population has declined by 30% since the 70s alone, long after once populous species like the passenger pigeon were hunted to extinction.
- eevilspock 5y agoOn the other hand, I've read that birds (and rodents) have thrived because of humans. We've killed off or limited the range of their predators. Many birds do well in cities, and unlike ground animals, they aren't stymied by all our roads and highways. So while the number of species of birds is likely much smaller, in terms of absolute population there might even be in increase. This is nothing to be proud of though. We might be to the planet what the coronavirus is to humans.
- havelhovel 5y agoSadly this isn’t true either. Some species that coexist with humans may be doing better, but they can be counted on one hand. North America’s bird population is 30% less than it was in the 70s.
- mips_avatar 5y agoInterestingly that number is of wild birds. Domesticated chickens are an additional 25 billion birds https://www.statista.com/statistics/263962/number-of-chickens-worldwide-since-1990/#:~:text=How%20many%20chickens%20are%20in,14.38%20billion%20chickens%20in%202000.&text=There%20are%20two%20major%20types,laying%20hens%2C%20and%20broiler%20chickens https://www.statista.com/statistics/263962/number-of-chicken....
- havelhovel 5y agoFor context, the bird population in North America has declined by around 3 billion since the 70s: a 30% decrease. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-billions-of-north-american-birds-have-vanished/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-bill...
- skynet-9000 5y agoKinda sounds like a question in a FAANG interview. The referenced study is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118
- pimlottc 5y agoInterviewer: At a rough estimate, how many birds are there in the entire world? Applicant: 50 billion Interviewer: Ah, I see you also read Hacker News! /culture fit: check/
- popotamonga 5y agoNot even 10 per person? Sounds low, thought there were more.